As Donald Trump stood in the Capitol Rotunda last week, blundering his way through his second oath of office, online liberals were preoccupied with debating another matter: who will be the first Democrat to call Republicans the R-word? Setting aside the question of whether they should use a term widely considered an ableist slur, that very debate was revealing, for a number of reasons.
On the morning of inauguration day, #DarkWoke began trending on Twitter/X. The hashtag – ostensibly a tongue-in-cheek reference to “Dark Brandon” – emerged in reaction to an exchange between the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the far-right influencer Chaya Raichik.
Over the weekend, Ocasio-Cortez posted an Instagram Reel in which she explained her lack of interest in attending any inaugural festivities. “I don’t celebrate r[*]pists,” she says bluntly. Raichik, whose social media account @LibsofTikTok is widely recognized for proliferating the anti-LGBTQ+ “groomer” moral panic, shared the video, declaring “another person Trump should sue”.
The congresswoman then retweeted Raichik, stating: “Oh, are you triggered? Cry more.” The post accrued more than 17m views, and in the process it birthed both a meme and a debate about Democrats’ approach to messaging for the next four years.
Should liberals start using slurs? No – and anyone who seriously entertains such a question has no business crafting comms strategy. It’s clear that Democrats’ current approach to messaging, however, is broken – and party leaders have no conception of how to fix it.
Yahoo News: What is Dark Woke & should the left embrace it? An explainer
In a lot of ways, this feels like the core of what’s behind Dark Woke — treating MAGA the exact same way they’ve been treating everyone else. And if that means kicking civility to the curb, then so be it. Sorry, Michelle Obama, they went low and we’re meeting them right there in the dirt.
But it’s entirely possible to embrace Dark Woke without becoming a wannabe edgelord who’s lost the plot. As one person on X pointed out, it’s kind of even an internet-centric repackaging of punk.
Fuck this confused me. I genuinely hate journalists who don’t just write the fucking words instead of “r-word”. Took me a long time to realize AOC called Trump a removed (person who sexually assaults others) and not an actual slur
This section was, in fact, about the ableist slur. The term for a sexual assaulter only comes into the article later, and is not called the r-word or censored.
Yeah, I was confused by the copied text in the OP because the word AOC used was changed into “removed” I think? Then it was edited to use an asterisk instead.
The confusion is definitely the shitty journalist’s fault, because the article is about AOC calling him out for his sexual assault but the journalist opened with a random tweet about democrats calling republicans the r-word, a thing that exists entirely in the imagination of the tweeter
Oh yeah that’s a big fucking difference